Category: Personal Essays

To start this post off on a positive note, I just want to announce that my long term disability application was approved today. As I’ve mentioned previously, the applicationprocess has been long and stressful and I’ve been living without any income or savings for several months. I’ve been planning hypothetically, based on a number of outcomes, how I was going to deal with my current financial situation and I’m extraordinarily grateful that I got the best of all the outcomes. If I manage everything responsibly, I’ll be in a great position to start moving forward with all of my financial and life plans when I return to work, rather than being in debt with no savings and having to start over from scratch.

Prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis, I often scoffed at the cost of my long term disability benefits. No more. I know that they seem expensive, but if you are ever in a situation like mine (and anyone can be), you will be terribly happy that you have them. Sometimes life throws curve balls at you and cancer can happen to anyone, even if you have no family history at all (which I don’t).

Now that I’ve dispensed with the happy news, it’s time to move on with the less happy news. As I’ve said on social media and to friends privately, my health has been declining significantly over the past few weeks. Because of this, writing has become much more difficult. My low energy levels have been sapping any desire to be creative at all. Coming up with topics to write about has become an exercise in pulling teeth and once I get started on writing something, I don’t feel attached to or interested in it at all.

And this is all okay, I expected that this would happen at some point. I think the best thing to do is to take a step back. I’m taking all of these feelings as my body’s way of telling me that I need a good, long break. I need to rest and let my body do what it wants for my last two treatments so that I can begin to recover. I’m going to focus on reading, resting and taking care of myself as best I can.

I can’t even begin to describe how happy writing has made me over the past six months. I managed to mostly keep to my schedule and write essays that I am (mostly) genuinely happy with. I am terribly proud of myself. There were a few folks in my life who doubted that I could keep up with writing for so long during treatment and I can’t tell you how happy I am to have proven them wrong.

Thank you to everyone who has read what I’ve had to say during this time. I’ve been writing for myself — just writing to write — but it’s been a tremendous boost and comfort to me to know that some of you have been reading and considering what I’ve had to say. I will always be grateful for your time, attention, and kind feedback and comments.

If I have any significant updates to share or if the mood to write strikes me suddenly, I’ll definitely be posting. Once I’m feeling better, I hope to resume a regular, if a little less frequent, posting schedule, but we’ll see. Take care, everyone!

I was going to start writing a series on my relationship with stuff and money today, but I don’t quite have my thoughts on it in order. I know I want to write several posts on this topic, but I’m not yet sure about how I want to split them up and how I want to approach writing them. I’m also a little shaken today by the Toronto terrorist attack and the relationship between the perpetrator and the Incel movement. Since the 2014 Isla Vista killings, perpetrated by Elliott Rodger, this kind of misogynistic, woman-hating violence has been terrifying to me. It drains my energy and makes me want to withdraw.

And so today I’m going to take things easy and just write a bit about what’s been going on in my life. The biggest news I’ve had to share recently, of course, is that I received the preliminary results of my latest PET scan and they’re excellent. I have very little active disease remaining and the chemotherapy is doing its job. Hopefully, if all goes well over the next few weeks, I will be having my last infusion on May 25th. And then, of course, the uphill climb toward recovery begins.

As I said in my last update, the recovery process is more than a little daunting. I had a bad wake-up call on the severity of the neuropathy in my hands a last week. I had been itching to play video games, so I spent more time than I should have playing my favourite MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, with a controller. I had horrible nerve pain in my fingers for several days afterward. I’m even more afraid of permanent damage now than I was a few weeks ago. I have to test things out from time to time, though, or I won’t able to judge my limits. I’m going to try playing for shorter periods and only a few days per week and see if I can manage that.

My long term disability situation is finally being worked out, though things were quite stressful there for a few days. The company I work for decided some time ago to switch insurance companies and the transfer will be completed at the end of April. I was assured that this would have no bearing on my LTD claim as our old insurer, who I was paying premiums to when I became disabled, would still be responsible for me. I received a call from my boss the other day that sent me into a an awful spiral. She told me that she had been informed by our company’s benefits administrator (who is a consultant) that my insurer had still not received the medical records from my doctor’s office. She implied that those records needed to be sent to the insurer before the end of the month or it would cause problems with my claim due to the transfer.

Of course, my stomach dropped into my knees and I started cursing myself for not speaking with a lawyer as soon as I found out that my employer was switching insurance companies. I had been doing my best to resolve the medical records issue (which, as I suspected, wound up being an enormous and frustrating problem) and had not been successful at getting my doctor’s office to fax my records properly. I frantically drove to my doctor’s office, basically having a huge meltdown on the way there only to receive a call from their office manager, while in the car, confirming that the records had been sent.

The next day, I called my boss and asked for a meeting with the benefits administrator. I got her contact information and she assured me that there is no problem with the transfer. She had simply been following up on my claim and told my boss that I might be able to expedite the situation if I contacted my doctor’s office and prodded them about the medical records. My boss then, without knowing what she was talking about at all, called me and gave me incorrect information and sent me into a complete meltdown about nothing. It was more than a little frustrating. I just don’t have the energy to deal with intense feelings like that right now, but thankfully my medical records have been sent in and now all I have left to do is wait for the results. I just want an answer, I’ll be okay with whatever’s thrown at me.

To finish up, I want to say that Frankie is doing very well. She’s a little small so far for a French Bulldog, but she’s finally starting to understand where she’s supposed to go to the bathroom and she’s starting to grow into a lovely dog. My mother and I were getting close to hiring a private trainer for a little while there and I know I frustrated the hell out of my old friend Deirdre (who is an awesome trainer and dog walker) with my whining, but things are finally starting to work out now. We’ve been enjoying the nice weather and she loves exploring in her yard. I finally feel like I’m in control of my own life again and I’m starting to love her the way I wanted to when we first brought her home.

I have chemo this afternoon and will be hunkered down in bed for most of the weekend. I hope you’re all well and plugging along!

The chemotherapy-induced neuropathy in my hands has forced me to make a lot of changes. I love cooking and baking, doing arts and crafts, and playing video games, but I haven’t been able to do those things since my first treatment. To keep myself busy, I’ve had to fill my time with some of my older hobbies that I haven’t made as much time for over the past few years. Mostly, I’ve been reading.

Right now, reading is exactly what I need. I’ve been avoiding physical books because they’re hard for me to hang on to, but my iPad mini and Kindle are easy on my hands. Books are also a great value for entertainment media: even if I’ve spent a bit more than what I should on them recently it’s pretty tough to get yourself into financial trouble by buying books, especially since I’m a fairly slow reader. Even better for my budget right now is the fact that I’m able to borrow free ebooks from the library. It’s a little tough to wait for the numerous holds on popular titles, but easy and free are worth it.

As I said above, I haven’t spent a lot of time reading books over the past few years. I’m currently on track to read 7 books in April which is, on average, a little more than I’ve read per year since I graduated university. This has definitely been a source of embarrassment. I’ve always seen myself as a reader and for most of my youth, reading was my main hobby. As I got older, I slowly found myself reading published books for fun less often. I think there were several reasons for this. Mostly, I struggled with finding my identity as an adult reader. With world of books being so enormous, I had trouble finding well-written, contemporary fiction that suited my taste and I didn’t always enjoy slogging through well-known classics. I would stick with one or two authors for awhile and then have no idea where to go when I had read all of their work that interested me.

University also took a lot of the fun out of reading. As a history major I would often have upwards of 600 pages of reading (or more, especially if it was time for term papers) per week. It wasn’t fun, easy reading: so much academic writing is dry and boring and remarkably difficult to slog through, even if the subject matter is interesting. The last thing I wanted to do with my free time was read more, even if reading fiction was more fun than reading academic non-fiction.

After finishing my undergraduate degree, I started my long and strange journey of being intentionally single and trying new things. I started playing video games. Video games led me down a path toward a lot of new (to me) media, like manga and anime. For a good while, I wanted to immerse myself in those new interests and give myself the time to enjoy them. This didn’t leave me with a lot of room for reading published books (though I did read lots of fanfiction, but that’s another story for another day). It’s hard for me to admit it, but books just sat on the back burner for awhile.

Being absorbed in reading again has been wonderful, like settling in for a lovely afternoon with an old friend. The ONTDreadingchallenge that I decided to participate in has been especially fantastic. I have the freedom to choose any book that fits each month’s theme, but I’m also forced to try out authors and genres that I normally wouldn’t consider reading on my own. Best of all, the participants all make loads of recommendations each month, which has helped me make some fun new discoveries!

In some ways, one of my greatest struggles as an adult has been balancing my free time. There are so many different activities that bring me joy that I often have trouble choosing what I should do on any given day. I hope that once my condition improves and I return to work that I’ll be able to make room in my life to continue reading. I won’t have as much time as I do now, but I’ve realized that it’s a hobby I should keep up with. I certainly have enough recommendations to keep me going for a good long while!

Are there any interests or hobbies that you aren’t making enough time for? What books are you reading right now? Let me know in the comments!

I was thinking the other day about how I’ve never really talked about being single for seven years. Yes, before I met my current boyfriend, who I’ve been involved with for almost four years now, I was intentionally single for over seven years. I know that the people around me noticed that I was single for a long time, but I don’t think anyone realized that I was doing it on purpose. I’d guess that many assumed I was single due to a lack of opportunities, but that’s actually not correct. I did have a few offers for set-ups and other opportunities; however, during those years, being single was the right thing for me.

I started my single journey when I was 26. I was working on my Masters degree and I had just gotten out of an “it’s complicated” that was toxic and bad for my self esteem (which has always been remarkably low regardless). At the time, I was spending a lot of time thinking about my history with relationships. I noticed that, despite having been involed with one person or another for over 10 years with no real breaks, all of my relationships and flirtations had either ended badly or had been completely unsatisfying. I also came to understand that I was the common denominator in these shitty romantic encounters and that I was making some consistent errors, but I wasn’t able to identify exactly where I was going wrong.

Once I realized that I was making all kinds of bad relationship decisions, I decided that I needed to be alone for awhile. I had always been a hypocritical proponent of taking breaks between relationships: I thought it was a great idea, but would never actually do it myself. I had also been a hypocritical proponent of being alone in general. I am definitely a person who has always needed (and enjoyed) spending a lot of time alone day-to-day, but I had no idea to how be alone without the support and comfort of a romantic partner in the background.

My original plan at the time was to avoid any romantic entanglements until after I finished my Masters degree. I thought that this would be enough time to figure a few things out and help me keep my life drama free while I finished up at school. Once I got a job and figured out where I would be living, I would start my romantic life again. Unfortunately, after finishing graduate school, I was never quite able to make it to the place I wanted to be professionally. I was only ever able to get short term contract jobs and in between those contacts I was mostly stuck at home and volunteering a few hours a week.

Staying single had started off as a way for me to take a break and figure things out, but as my career stalled it became a necessity. In my late 20s and early 30s, I wanted to date an adult: someone with a full time job and at least a little ambition. With my career floundering, I felt like I couldn’t start dating again — how could I possibly set criteria for potential partners that I couldn’t meet myself? I knew that I couldn’t have the kind of relationship that I wanted to have if I couldn’t get some traction with my career.

It probably sounds like I was forcing myself to stay single, but in reality I was happy being on my own. I had, for many years, been certain that I didn’t want to have children, which allowed me the freedom of not worrying about finding a stable relationship by a certain age. I was also enjoying the astonishing lack of drama in my life. For a great deal of my early and mid-20s, I was bombarded with oodles of family and relationship drama. Most of my romantic relationships weren’t particularly stable and generally caused me a lot of stress; my parents’ split was difficult; my grandparents all became ill and died in the span of 8 years. During the time I was single, my life was relatively stable, apart from the difficulties in my career.

And I learned a lot about life and about myself while I was single. It was an enormous period of personal growth for me and I couldn’t have accomplished even half of it had I been in a relationship. I finished my Masters degree; I moved to Alberta on 10 days’ notice by myself and lived and worked there for a year; I learned how to play video games and all about Japanese culture and manga and anime; I read loads of books and manga; I watched loads of TV series, movies and anime; I learned how to cook, to bake, to knit; I wrote thousands of words for my blog; I participated in writing challenges; I learned about feminism and social justice; I learned how to set goals and how to work on myself.

Most importantly, by a long shot, I learned how to be emotionally independent. Before starting that journey, I couldn’t deal with any of my problems on my own. If something bad happened, I couldn’t cope and needed to tell everyone I knew about it. I couldn’t help myself — I just didn’t know how to manage my emotional pain and struggle. Being single for so long taught me how to reach inward, how to keep my own secrets, and when it’s appropriate to reach out for help.

The only thing I wasn’t able to work out was what I was doing wrong in my relationships — I didn’t learn that until awhile after I met my current boyfriend. I’m not sure I’ll have the courage to write about that any time soon, but you never know! What I do know for sure is that being single for seven years is one of the best things I have ever done for myself. No regrets whatsoever.

I’m burning out. After months of propping myself up, telling myself that everything is going to be okay, and a few weeks of struggling with a new puppy, I’m starting to get exhausted in a way that I don’t know how to recover from. This is a dangerous place for me because it’s prime depression ground. I know that after I was first diagnosed with cancer I entered a kind of hyper-vigilant phase. This often happens to me during times of personal or family crisis. I step up, I do what needs to be done and I manage. I take care of whoever needs taking care of, I provide the shoulder to cry on, I neglect myself.

Generally speaking, this kind of behaviour isn’t particularly destructive. Most of us will have to step up and manage personal crises, care for loved ones etc… and there will always be some combination of adrenaline or sense of personal duty to keep us going. The problem is, eventually that runs out — or at least it does for me. In 2013-2014, when I had to act as a caregiver for my mother, I looked after everything. I did all the housework, cooking, driving to and from appointments, grocery shopping and ran all the errands. I also went back to school part time and managed my coursework. It was familiar territory for me in many ways, because I also had to care a great deal for two of my grandparents when I was in my 20s, but it was difficult. It’s never easy to see your parents suffering — it is the definitive indicator of your finally becoming an independent adult. I think, no matter how old we get, we tend to see our parents as people who should be looking after us and not the other way around.

My mother needed surgery and once she began to recover from that, I truly began to fall apart. I fell down into a deep, depressive pit and could not claw my way out: I spent about 18 months playing Final Fantasy XIV (the MMO sickness finally hit me) and taking one easy course in my certificate program at a time. I convinced myself that as long as I could complete the courses, I was totally fine.

I wasn’t totally fine. I was anything but totally fine. I needed help and (probably) medication. While depression is a consistent issue for me, I have had sustained periods where my depression worsens to the point of my not being able to function. Over the years I’ve come to recognize that significant burnout is one of my major triggers. A crisis occurs, I step up and go at it until I run out of steam, and then I fall apart.

So, right now, I’m a little terrified. My dog, Daisy, died on October 20, 2017. Two weeks later, during the first week of November 2017, I was hospitalized. A few weeks later, I was diagnosed with cancer. By the end of 2017, I had had a port installed and started chemotherapy. Despite some fairly minor fear and nervousness, I have stood up and faced these issues head on. I haven’t been on the floor crying, as some expected me to be. I’ve been productive and I’ve made an effort to enjoy myself, despite side effects that limit what I can do with my spare time.

But then we were stupid and we got a puppy. The greatest piece of advice I could ever offer someone right now is that you should not get a puppy when there are things going on in your life that are stressful and potentially life-changing. People will always tell you that puppies are hard, but reading/hearing that and then actually living it are two totally different things. Puppies are much more difficult than anyone will ever tell you and the fatigue from cancer treatment certainly doesn’t make things any easier and any other major stressors in your life won’t help you either.

When we first got Frankie, I went through another short phase of hyper-vigilance. My adrenaline got going and I was able to manage everything again. I trained her when I was able, became much more mobile, and generally felt physically stronger. A few bad days later, however, and I’m starting to feel all that strength leaving me. I just don’t have the energy right now to sustain the kind of consistency that Frankie needs. I’m tired and I’m sick and I get lazy sometimes.

I know that things will get better with Frankie and I know that, eventually, we will bond properly and I will love her more than anything, but I’m scared right now that all of this new stress might push me somewhere that I don’t want to go. I’m going to make an appointment with my social worker as soon as I can so that I can talk with her about how to avoid falling into another dark and awful pit. I’m hoping that talking about it with a professional will help me a great deal. I think also, a little vacation will help. Next week, my boyfriend is coming for a visit and, hopefully, that will be a nice break where I can be a little selfish for a few days and recharge my batteries.

As a follow-up to last week’s post on 4 reasons why I hate personal blogging, I wanted to spend some time discussing why I love personal blogging. Just for fun, here’s another listicle where the items are much longer than they should be.

1. I love to write

I’ve always loved writing and, for the most part, I’ve always written. As I said in last week’s post, I’ve kept some sort of personal blog for over 20 years now. Aside from that, I have written in many other formats: research papers, school newspaper articles, legal reports for probate courts, archival finding aids, essays, literary criticism, short stories, tip sheets and training materials, marketing materials, project plans, correspondence, and policies and procedures. There are probably a few more items in there, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Whether for personal, academic, or professional tasks, I have written a great deal over the course of my life. Writing is, without doubt, my preferred means of communication. Of course, some of that writing has been less fun to slog through, but if I’m working on a project that requires writing, that will probably be my favourite part. Essay and report writing, in particular, have always been the most fun types of writing for me. Though I have tried, I’ve never much liked writing fiction or poetry — I’ve never seen myself as a person with a great creative imagination. I’m best at reporting what I know, whether it be through research or personal experience.

To be good at writing, you need to practice. My current job is quite writing heavy, as I need to produce some kind of reporting product for most of my research files; however, those reports are heavily templated and rigid in terms of language and formatting. Keeping a personal blog allows me to continue writing in a way that helps me get out of the formats I need to stick with at work. Personal blogging has also helped me to clean up some of my bad habits over the years. For example, I will probably always be a rambler and I will always use too many adverbs, but proofreading my blogs over the years has stopped me from writing “really” every few sentences (or more).

3. It provides me with a place to express my views and opinions, while providing me with a record of myself and my feelings during a particular time.

Even if reading through old posts later on often makes me cringe.

4. Blogging has helped me to become a more adaptable writer

At my current job, I have seen firsthand that many smart university graduates can struggle with transitioning their writing from a style that works for academia into a style that works in a professional setting. This has never been a problem for me, because I’ve always written outside of what was required of me at school. Even if it was just to rant about hassles or drama in my personal life, being able to structure and write something informal that wasn’t a research paper has always been useful.

I also believe that the more often you write and the more different types of writing projects you take on, the less attached you are to one particular style. Of course, all writers will have their own preferences in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure (hopefully they have a good grasp on both), but the best writers, in my opinion, are able to relax their own preferences and adapt to the task at hand.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this miniseries on what I love and hate about blogging. Do you enjoy writing in your free time? Is it one of your least favourite things to do? I’d love to hear about your experiences with writing or blogging!

In my next two regular posts I want to spend some time discussing what I like and dislike about personal blogging. Since I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment with the new puppy at home, I’d like to vent a few of my frustrations before focusing on the positive aspects of what I’m doing and why I enjoy it so much. I’d like to just quickly note that, for the purposes of my next two posts, the type of blogging that I’m going to be talking about is personal, hobbyist blogging: i.e. blogging with little or no intention to monetize or market a business.

1. Choosing topics

If you have a blog about something in particular, topics can be quite easy. If you want to have a blog about video games, for example, you can probably generate at least a few post topics per week, because you can write about gaming news stories, gaming culture or about games that you’ve been playing recently. For me, writing a personal blog that is just about me and my life, without a real topical focus, is a little challenging.

Part of this problem is that I have lots of options for topics, but they’re not always things that I’m ready or willing to discuss publicly. I want to choose topics that are of interest to me, but that also might be of interest to the audience I’m communicating with, even if I’m not wholly certain of who that audience might be. The public at large doesn’t need to know that my mother and I had an argument on Tuesday or that I had a crappy week at work. Finding topics that allow me to express my thoughts and feelings without being too personal can be a bit tricky at times, especially since I’m currently trying to write two essay length posts per week.

2. Listicles

Did you notice the clever title of this blog? Does it sound like anything you’ve read before? I’m sure it does. The listicle has permeated our culture and online vernacular: it is ubiquitous. We are all guilty of reading them and now I am finally guilty of writing one. I can understand why they’re so popular from the perspective of both readers and writers: they’re easy. It requires very little effort or skill to write 1 or 2 sentences about pretty well anything and even less effort or skill to read and analyze 10 bullet points.

I read just as many listicles as anyone reading this (probably more) and, for me, they make personal, essay-style blogging a bit difficult for a few reasons:

They are so easy to write that I actively have to discourage myself from writing them (I’m trying to challenge myself to be at least a bit succinct in a formal, paragraphed style).

They’ve had a hand in lowering the internet’s attention span, thus making it more challenging to get eyes on long form, paragraphed content.

Most blogging prompt resources have nothing but listicle prompts because they are geared toward monetized, professional blogs, where listicles belong.

3. Narcissism, or the appearance of narcissism

Obviously, I believe that personal blogging is valuable and I enjoy doing it, but sometimes you just get sick of yourself and you worry about your readers getting sick of you as well.

4. Privacy concerns

I’ve been blogging for roughly 20 years. I’ve been thinking about writing, and may still write, about my relationship with blogging and how it has changed over the course of my adult life. The internet has changed so much during that time and the blog I started with was nothing like the blog I have today. I built a website using Netscape Composer and would post essays that I had written, some for fun and some for my high school newspaper. Since those humble beginnings, I have had at least 5 other blogs.

I’ve never shared any of those blogs with people in my offline life. My blogs have always been a part of my online life, which, for the past 20 years I have generally kept separate from my life offline. For the most part, this allowed me to remain anonymous, which provided me with a great deal of freedom. I could write about whatever I wanted, complain about whatever I wanted, contemplate out loud whatever I wanted, without worrying about hurting any feelings or offending my family or offline friends.

These days, things aren’t that simple. The emergence of social media has meant that my online and offline lives have been blurred together in ways that have often made me uncomfortable. I’ve grown accustomed to hiding significant aspects of myself from the two disparate halves of my life over the years and now that I am actually sharing my personal writing on Facebook, the stakes have become even higher. I don’t feel like I need to censor myself too much, but I do feel the need to be more careful about my writing than I have in the past.

Personal blogging certainly does have its challenges and I’m sure that I will run into further frustrations down the road, but as I mentioned above, I do enjoy it. On Tuesday I will be exploring some of the reasons why I keep a personal blog and why I have loved doing it for so many years. Please look forward to it!